WEEK 4

Electronics Production

Assignment:

• Characterise the specification of your PCB production process (group project)
• Make an in-circuit programmer by milling the PCB (program it, so that you can use it to pgoram your board in Electronics Design week, and in other weeks), then optionally trying other processes.

For this week’s assignment I followed the lovely Fab Academy tutorial on how to build and program a FabTiny ISP.

As the tutorial suggested the first step I took was downloading the traces and board outline files. I will be using these files to create to mill out the board on the Roland SRM-20. The first thing I did was upload the traces file into mods . From mods I am able to edit the millings settings and send the cut file directly to the Roland.

Once everything was set up, I sent the cut file and milled the first the traces onto my board. I then followed similar steps for the board outline and cut my board out.



Next step is stuffing my board. Here are the components for the board:
• 1 ATTiny 44 microcontroller
• 1 Capacitor 1uF
• 2 Capacitor 10 pF
• 2 Resistor 100 ohm
• 1 Resistor 499 ohm
• 1 Resistor 1K ohm
• 1 Resistor 10K
• one 6 pin header
• 1 USB connector
• 2 jumpers - 0 ohm resistors
• 1 Crystal 20MHz
• two Zener Diode 3.3 V
• one usb mini cable
• one ribbon cable
• two 6 pin connectors




This is my first time soldering anything honestly. My experience with circuitry is very limited. Luckily Luciano gave us a quick run tutorial on soldier techniques and tips. This helped a lot. I felt more confident and was ready to solder my board. It took me a few tries but I successfully soldered my board.



The next thing I did was check my board by plugging my board in and seeing if there was any smoke coming out. Thank the lord now smoke appeared!

Next step is programming my fabISP. For this step I used Jean-Michel’s computer since he had a Mac. I tried to program my board using my computer (windows) but I was having crazy amount of problems. Once I switched to a Mac programming the programming the board became much smoother. I used my fellow classmates, Emily St Germain’s fabISP that she programmed earlier in the week to program my own board. Commands to Program board:
1. Make Clean
2. make hex
3. make fuse
4. make program


My FabISP works!